Many businesses and customer service organizations utilize telephone call centers to place outbound telephone calls and receive inbound telephone calls to and from customers or potential customers, for example, for credit collection or telemarketing. Computer telephony integration (CTI) which integrates computer control over a telephone switching system has allowed telephone call centers to more efficiently handle both outbound telephone calls and inbound telephone calls. These computerized telephony systems typically include an automated or predictive dialer that automatically places outbound telephone calls and an automatic call distributor (ACD) that handles large volumes of inbound telephone calls. These, and other components of the telephony system, are controlled by a telephone call center management system. One example of a system and method for integrating outbound and inbound telephone calls is disclosed in greater detail in U.S. Pat. No. 5,586,179, issued Dec. 17, 1996, assigned to the assignee of the present invention and incorporated herein by reference.
Telephone call centers also include a number of audio head sets and data terminals used by agents or operators to communicate with the called parties and calling parties. Using a data terminal, such as a PC, an agent can view and/or enter call record data pertaining to the party (e.g., the customer or potential customer) and the transaction being made. The telephone call center management system typically controls the allocation of the agents to the inbound and/or outbound telephone calls and the management of the data presented to the agents and entered by the agents. The processing of a series of telephone calls (inbound or outbound) in a telephone call center is often referred to as a call campaign.
Modern CTI systems include sophisticated hardware and software designed to improve the efficiency of call centers. For example, when servicing inbound calling campaigns, call center CTI systems attempt to identify a calling party before the calling party is actually connected to a live call center agent. When a calling party is identified, the CTI system can search through its database of customer records and determine whether or not the calling party is a known customer. If the calling party is a known customer, then the CTI system can retrieve information regarding the customer from the database and display certain pieces of the retrieved information on the agent display associated with the call center agent to whom the incoming call is directed. In this way, the call center agent will have information available to him or her that will aid in the processing of the call. For example, the incoming caller's name and address may be displayed so that instead of requiring the call center agent to transcribe the name and address of the calling party into the system in real time, the CTI system would include the information in the appropriate fields and only require the call center agent to verify the name and address of the calling party. In this way, transcription errors will be avoided and the time required for an agent to type the information into his or her terminal will be eliminated.
Various systems and methods exist by which a CTI system can obtain identifying information from an incoming caller. One such system includes an integrated voice response (IVR) unit which queries an incoming caller to input certain information into his or her telephone keypad, such as an account number or the like. This type of system requires an action on the part of an incoming caller, and as such is not an ideal situation since many incoming callers will simply not provide the desired information and will merely hang up upon being connected to an IVR unit. Therefore, more sophisticated systems have been developed, which do not require any action on the part of a calling party to identify that party.
Typically, these more sophisticated systems include automatic number identification (ANI) and dialed number identification (DNI) systems. ANI is a basic element of telephone calls, which is transported throughout the public and private telephone networks. For the North America Numbering Plan (NANP), an ANI string currently includes 10 digits. ANI is used extensively by CTI systems for call routing, call billing, call tracking and call identification.
For example, a CTI system may use the information that is provided by these two basic information sources as follows. First, the CTI system would identify the DNI in order to identify the nature of the incoming call. The system would then retrieve information from a database, such as a script or product or service information that an agent could use in handling the call. Simultaneously, the CTI system could search a database of existing customers and identify if an customer exists that has called from the number identified by the ANI signal. If such a customer exists, then the CTI system can display customer information on an agent display or merge the same with the retrieved product or service information to facilitate the agent's handling of the incoming call.
However, as more and more telephone extensions are placed in service (e.g. mobile telephones), telephone companies are finding that the limit of telephone numbers available in certain area codes are being reached. This is especially true in larger metropolitan areas. Accordingly, the telephone companies are splitting geographic areas that had previously been served by one telephone area code into areas having two or more new area codes. Fortunately, the remaining portion of the existing telephone number are not affected by area code changes. Nonetheless, an area code change places an immediate burden on many CTI systems since the systems will not be able to readily identify calls placed from telephone numbers that have had their area codes changed. For example, an existing customer having an old telephone number of (123) 456-7890, which is retained in a customer record, would not be identified by a CTI system if the customer's area code were changed.
Since area codes are assigned based on some type of geographic attribute associated with a telephone number (e.g. house location), area code changes are based on sub-geographic attributes within an initial geographic area. Thus, in order to update a database of call records to reflect area code changes, a database maintainer would need to know all of the geographic rules applicable to an area code change as well as the geographic attributes associated with each telephone number maintained in the database. As can be appreciated, this would be an impractical task.
In addition, since customer record databases are generally maintained by product or service providers and not by sophisticated computer information system organizations, the resources, in terms of programmers, would not generally be available to update a database even if all of the geographic area code change rules were known.
Therefore, what is needed is an automatic area code update system and method that would operate in conjunction with a CTI system and, specifically, an ANI-based customer identification module thereof. Such a system would be especially desirable if it included a simple graphical user interface that would allow a non-technically skilled CTI system supervisor to input area code changes into the CTI system and have the system perform an intelligent area code search each time an incoming call is detected that has originated from a new area code that has been input into the system.